Rapper Peaceful Gemini doesn’t do small talk. Her latest collaboration with Waiian, “We Need 2 Talk,” acts as a two-round heavyweight match between personal demons and societal ills – all set to Mesklun’s Billy Cobham-sampled beat that hits like an uppercut to the conscience.
The track opens with Gemini dissecting childhood scars with surgical precision, her flow dancing between wounded and defiant over boom bap instrumentals. That interplay manifests in the production: Cobham’s jazz-funk sample gets flipped into something harder, a boom-bap backbone that forces urgency into every bar. When Waiian enters, his verse lands raw observations about surviving a system rigged from the start. “Too explicit to mention, but my verse was based on my experiences: these are things that I have seen, I have heard about, and experiences of the working-class Filipino,” Waiian explains. Together, they transform what could’ve been another normal bar per bar trade-off into a manifesto for collective healing.
For Gemini, the collaboration marks her second release this year following January’s “Piece of Gem.” For Waiian, it’s his first appearance since releasing his third album Backshots this year. “Writing this material became an essential part of my shadow work,” Gemini says. “It’s a process of confronting past traumas and reclaiming my voice. The journey was far from easy, but I remained committed to the challenges of tracing pain back to its roots. This is why I chose healing over bitterness.”
What makes “We Need 2 Talk” resonate isn’t just its honesty, but its timing. In a hip-hop landscape obsessed with flex culture, two of the scene’s sharpest lyricists just dropped a masterclass in vulnerability as strength.
